Making History: The Great War

I keep a mental shelf of grand-strategy games sorted by how well they model the actual levers of historical power, and Making History: The Great War earns a slot there for one specific reason: it treats the First World War as the economic-political catastrophe it was, not just a parade of trenches and artillery barrages. Managing coal, oil, food, munitions, government stability, and ideological unrest all feed into each other in ways that will feel familiar to anyone who has lost a Paradox campaign to overextension. The week-long turn structure runs over a global map with twelve data overlays covering diplomacy, resources, demographics, supply, and national stability, and seven tabbed windows let you drill into politics, military, trade, and production. That is a lot of UI to internalize, and the game does not hold your hand for long. Here is where I will make the newcomer case, because I think most dismissals of this game misjudge it. The tutorial is functional rather than brilliant, but the smarter entry point is the 1912 scenario, which drops you two years before hostilities and lets you quietly learn resource stockpiling, city development, and the trade web before anyone declares war. Starting as a mid-tier power, Serbia or Bulgaria for instance, teaches the diplomatic pressure system faster than reading any guide. The political climate of the era means war arrives eventually regardless of your intentions, which is itself a genuinely educational design choice: the alliance entanglements that dragged the great powers in feel organic rather than scripted. Each major nation also plays differently enough to justify multiple runs. Winning as the British Empire, with its sprawling colonial logistics chain, demands a completely different approach than managing Germany's two-front pressure or Russia's chronic instability and revolution risk. The depth of decision-making covers technology research (tanks, warplanes, submarines, poison gas all arrive as researchable options), trench construction, adjacent-region artillery bombardments, colonial governance choices between direct control, protectorates, and puppet states, and covert operations including funding coups and stoking civil wars in rival nations. That is a genuine sandbox of levers. The AI is the game's ceiling, though. At lower difficulties it telegraphs moves early, and once you internalize a few patterns you can read it reliably. Reviewers noted the AI can surprise with ahistorical choices, Germany abandoning the Schlieffen Plan in favor of a Russia-first strategy for instance, which adds some variance, but the surprise factor diminishes after two or three full campaigns. The graphics are functional rather than impressive, built for information density over presentation, and resource fluctuations in the economic model can feel erratic in ways that punish players for things outside their control. The mod ecosystem through Steam Workshop is a meaningful plus. A scenario editor lets the community fill the content gap the base game leaves, and given that the title ships with only two scenarios (1912 and August 1914), community content matters for long-term replay. Cross-platform multiplayer on PC, Mac, and Linux broadens the pool if you want to test yourself against humans rather than the AI, which is the honest answer to the AI ceiling problem. This is not a competitor to Hearts of Iron IV in scope or mechanical precision, and players expecting that level of granularity will bounce off it. What it does offer is a lower entry barrier to globe-spanning WWI strategy, an authentic economic interdependency model, and a period that is genuinely underserved in the genre.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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